But despite its apparent intensity her emotion seemed to have been a transient one for it did not recur. The pallor left her cheeks. She became the gay, charming companion he had always known.
They had many things to discuss and time became of no importance—until Lydia looked down at the tiny gold watch gleaming against the white of her slender wrist, and gave an exclamation of dismay.
‘A quarter to eleven. I’ll have to fly, Martin.’
‘Does Cinderella have to be back so early?’
‘I promised Sandy I’d be in by eleven. She’ll be waiting up for me.’
‘Patient Sandra! She’s going to miss you, Lydia.’
‘Not so much as I’m going to miss her,’ returned Lydia. ‘She’s been my fairy godmother and guardian angel combined.’
Vaughan fetched the short evening cloak she had brought and placed it about her shoulders with just a touch of possessiveness.
‘I’ll see you back to the house.’
‘No, Martin,’ she said quickly. ‘I’d rather you didn’t. After all, there are the proprieties to think about—even in Dalmering. People will probably talk enough as it is about my coming here alone. Besides, it’s only a few minutes’ walk; it isn’t worth dragging you out for such a short distance.’
She saw that he was going to raise objections and her voice became coaxing.
‘Please, Martin. Just this last service—to round off a perfect evening.’
He was unwilling to acknowledge defeat, but defeat it was. He shrugged his shoulders in helpless acceptance of it.
‘When you attack me like that you leave me no defence.’
‘Thank you, Martin,’ she said softly. ‘For tonight—and everything.’
For several reasons Lydia Dare was glad that she was alone on the short walk back to the attractive half-timbered cottage she shared with Sandra Borne. Her mind was a confused tangle of impressions which she wished to sort out and label before their chaos overwhelmed her.
It was not that she had any doubts as to the wisdom of her marrying Gerald Farrant in preference to Martin Vaughan. She had known that Vaughan was in love with her before she had accepted his invitation to dine with him. As she had told him, it had been one of the reasons why she had gone.
But now she was not quite certain whether her action, which had sprung from a vague desire to make things easier for him—some kind of repressed maternal instinct she told herself wryly—had been a wise one. She had under-rated the situation. She had imagined it to be perfectly simple and easy to handle, and instead it had proved to be bristling with psychology.
Martin Vaughan was not a stranger. She had known him for so long that she could anticipate his ideas and his moods and the way in which he would react. At least, so she had believed. Now she was not sure.
She had become aware that his was a powerful personality; that although his strength might be latent, concealed beneath the veneer of a placid existence in a small country community, he could be masterful and dominant—all those things, in fact, which women are reputed to desire in men.
She was conscious of a disturbed, unsettled feeling, a sensation of disaster in the air. She hesitated and looked about her, as if to gain comfort from her surroundings.
It was a quietly peaceful early summer night. There were still odd lights dotted here and there to reveal that Dalmering was not yet wholly abed, but most of them marked the homes of the colony.
Dalmering consisted of the old village, with its tiny cluster of houses and its handful of miniature shops, lying along the main road; and a much more recent outcrop of larger houses which were the homes of its temporary residents, the weekenders and the city businessites who had discovered its unspoilt beauty. It was in these latter that the lights were to be observed. The older Dalmering, the true Dalmering, which had endured through the centuries with an impassive tranquillity, facing birth and death and the catastrophes of war and nature with equal undismay, was already enveloped in darkness and sleep.
Even the moon seemed to be aware of the division. Motionless banks of cloud hung in the sky, obscuring its rays from certain angles, so that whilst the newer houses were clearly outlined, as though to indicate that their inhabitants were in no hurry to retire, the old village was an undisturbed pool of ink in the midst of the radiance.
The sighing rustle of the waves on the shingle came plainly to her ears. The sea was no more than a mile away, and although the air was almost still, the salty tang and feel of the water was all about her.
Beauty was about her, too. Dalmering typified the real loveliness, the unbearable heartrending beauty of England—a beauty of flared sunsets and silver sea; of lonely moors and winding, dusty roads; of shady lanes, straggly roofs and scented hedgerows—a beauty which she could feel and which rose in her throat like a sweet agony and yet for which she was without words.
To reach her destination she had first to cross the open ground rather like an extended, haphazardly shaped and uneven version of the ancient village common, around which Martin Vaughan’s and the other houses were placed, and then walk along the narrow but well-worn pathway which traversed a small copse about twenty or thirty yards in depth before it made contact with the roadway leading to the old village—and, incidentally, her cottage.
She made her way at a quicker pace down the slope leading to the wooden bridge over the stream which zigzagged an apparently aimless way across the common, and in a few moments had reached the copse.
As she entered it the moonlight ceased and the shadows rushed upon her. The first few steps she took were blind and hesitant. Although she had trodden the path countless times before it was as though she had walked into an unknown world of darkness in which she was lost and alone.
Something rustled close at hand. So close that it startled her and she stopped abruptly, her heart thudding.
Her first reasoned thought was that Vaughan had followed her, after all. She knew that he had not been behind her as she had crossed the common, but although he would have had a greater distance to cover it would have been easily possible for him to have gone round by the roadway and reached the copse before her.
‘Is that you, Martin? You shouldn’t have bothered.’
She tried to speak casually, but her voice was unreal and a little desperate. It surprised her with its shrill uncertainty.
There was no sound in reply. All around her it was still and somehow dreadfully silent.
And now there was fear at her side. The darkness was becoming less intense, but the shadows which were detaching themselves from the deeper blackness were grotesque and ugly and menacing. They were no longer the shadows of friendly things, but were alien and distorted, reaching up to her, stretching out greedy fingers to drag her down.
She knew that it was a lie born of an imagination no longer under her control but momentarily she was incapable of restoring her conscious reason. She gave a stifled sob and began to run.
It might have been the signal for all the power of the evil she had been secretly fearing for so long to rise up against her. For suddenly she was no longer alone on the path.
She turned against her will to see that horror was there. A twisted, devilish horror, with insatiate eyes in the impossible mask of a fiend. An incredible horror, which paralysed her body and which her mind refused to believe.
And as she stared, incapable of movement, it resolved itself into a searing, sharp-edged pain—a pain which both pierced her through and enveloped her in its intensity. It screamed through her nerves to a fierce and terrible climax, and then there was no feeling any more—no pain, no fear, only a great, embracing silence, in the soft arms of which she lay utterly still.
2
EVEN IN HIS early ’sixties Mordecai Euripides Tremaine still preserved many of his boyish enthusiasms. One of them was a delight in all kinds of travel, even when the countryside through which he was passing held no undiscovered treasures for him.
It was a source of secret amusement to the other occu
pants of the compartment in the electric train which was carrying him swiftly southwards from Victoria to observe the eagerness with which he surveyed the rapidly changing landscape. Villages, farmhouses, green country-side–all appeared to have the same fascination for him as for a child seeing all these wonders for the first time.
His fellow travellers so far forgot the conventional reserve of the English using a public conveyance as to express their surprise at his obvious animation by exchanging glances among themselves. They would have had more surprise to express had they realized that they, too, came within the scope of his intense interest. Mordecai Tremaine had developed the valuable asset of being able to take comprehensive and sometimes devastating stock of his neighbours without giving them the least suspicion that he was at all interested in them.
It was not a gift which had descended upon him unawares, but was the result of a deliberate and often painstaking policy, sustained over a long period. To observe without being observed, and to observe accurately, had been the goal towards which he had striven with a persistence and faithfulness of purpose any potential martyr might have envied.
There was, of course, a reason for this somewhat unorthodox ambition. Within the shell of a slightly built, harmless-looking citizen, with greying hair, pince-nez and a regrettable but pronounced tendency to become garrulous, there dwelt a personality with attributes which were in violent contrast to the carpet slipper body which was displayed to the world. During the years when he had stood behind the counter of his tobacconist’s shop, dispensing packets of twenty, pipe cleaners and the brands of tobacco most favoured by his customers, Mordecai Tremaine’s mind had not been on those mundane means to a moderate livelihood. Instead, his thoughts had been travelling a darker, more savage and yet infinitely more exciting road.
Murder and Mordecai Tremaine had the sound of strange bedfellows, but nevertheless murder was his hobby. Many a night after the last customer had been satisfied had been spent in the cosy room over the shop, discussing the latest crime to horrify a public which openly decried but secretly welcomed blood with the breakfast newspaper. That his discussions had been with an acquaintance whose position as a police-surgeon brought him into intimate contact with the details of such crimes had put an edge to his enjoyment and had lent point to the rows of books on criminology which filled his bookshelves.
The days of the tobacconist’s shop were over now. When he had judged that his profits would provide enough for his moderate needs, Mordecai Tremaine had wisely retired. He had invested his capital with a careful eye to the maximum of return for the minimum of worry over the fickle variations of share prices, and had settled down to his hobby in earnest.
It was not so much the retired business man who looked out upon the world from behind the old-fashioned pince-nez which seemed to be always on the point of slipping to disaster as the keen criminologist and eager student of human nature. His relaxation was sought now not in the closely printed pages of his books after working hours, but in the study of his fellow men and the complex and fascinating emotions and passions by which they were swayed. The fact that the gods of chance had seen fit to involve him in two real-life murder cases since his retirement, and that he now numbered among his friends two inspectors of police, including one from Scotland Yard itself, had served to enslave him more.
He glanced around the compartment at his companions, thereby compelling them to make self-conscious efforts to appear as though they had not been furtively eyeing him. There seemed to be nothing of particular significance in his manner, but when he turned back towards the window his preoccupation was not with the landscape but with the mental exercise of placing the four people whom his brief examination had covered.
Three were men and one a woman. This last was middle-aged, cheerful-looking, and, judging from the filled shopping basket, returning from an expedition to the market town two stations up the line where she had joined the train. The mother of a family of healthy young animals, he decided—probably the wife of one of the local farmers, out with the object of supplementing her home-baked farmhouse fare.
Of the men, two responded equally easily to analysis. One was a parson—too easy that, he decided; the collar left no opportunity for theorizing. The second, from his neat, pin-striped suit, a little shiny at the elbows, and the leather brief-case in various papers taken from which he had been engrossed, was almost equally obviously a city business man paying an out of town call.
The third man presented more of a problem. Tremaine had been trying to affix a label to him for some while, for he had already been in the compartment at Victoria when he himself had entered.
He was a middle-aged man, whose round, bespectacled face and plump figure—enclosed in a well-cut if somewhat creased blue suit—should have suggested good humoured prosperity and yet somehow failed to do so. The cheeks which should have been smoothly aglow with well-being had a faint trace of flabbiness, and there were little lines of strain etched into their folds. The eyes behind the spectacles had a darting, worried quality, as though some urgent problem was pressing upon their owner and he was searching frantically not so much to solve as to evade it.
Mordecai Euripides Tremaine (his name was a legacy from parents in whose minds had dwelt a hazy but fervent appreciation of the Arthurian legends and the Greek classics) gave him a great deal of thought, but without the satisfaction of the said thought crystallizing into a sound theory. He had not, he told himself regretfully, achieved the skill of a Sherlock Holmes, whose agile brain and sharp eyes would have required no more than a few moments in which to give the stranger—to use a phrase from Shakespeare—both a local habitation and a name.
The next station was that at which he was to alight. As he stepped down to the platform he squared his shoulders and breathed deeply and deliberately. He fancied already that he could smell the sea—he had made up his mind that he would do so before he had left the compartment—and although he had never sailed the ocean in anything more substantial than his imagination a hint of salt in the air was always enough to set his blood racing.
He recognized the much-travelled little saloon car standing in the station courtyard in the same instant that he himself was recognized. He waved a greeting to the middle-aged couple, evidently husband and wife, who had been awaiting him, and Paul Russell came towards him and reached for his hand.
‘Glad to see you, old man,’ he said warmly.
Tremaine returned the grip, smiling into the kindly eyes in his friend’s weather-beaten face.
‘You’re looking well, Paul,’ he told him. ‘How is everything? Are all the Dalmering babies being born at a respectable hour now instead of dragging the unlucky doctor out of his bed in the middle of the night and robbing him of his beauty sleep?’
Jean Russell came round the car to join her husband.
‘Talking about babies in a public place is no fit way for a bachelor to behave,’ she said, with mock severity. ‘I can see you’re still a problem child, Mordecai, despite your grey hair!’
A busy country practice and a great deal of voluntary social work left neither Paul Russell nor his wife a great deal of time for relaxation, but Mordecai Tremaine had made their acquaintance on one of their rare holidays and he had enjoyed their friendship ever since. Tolerant and easy going, and yet with the ability to work desperately hard; very much alive to social evils and doing what they could to combat them, and yet possessed of a cheerful good humour, the Russells had made an appeal to him which he had found irresistible. Although it was several years since he had been able to spend any length of time with them they had corresponded regularly.
As he was climbing into the saloon, Tremaine saw Russell nod a greeting to someone who was just passing the car, and he saw the passer-by raise his hat to the doctor’s wife. It was the plump man in the blue suit who had puzzled him in the train.
‘One of the locals?’ he asked curiously.
‘Yes and no,’ returned Russell. ‘His name’s Shannon. He live
s about half a mile up the road from our place. Why? Do you know him?’
There seemed to be just a trace of a sharper note of enquiry in the doctor’s voice than the original question had appeared to warrant, but it was so faint that Tremaine was uncertain whether it possessed any significance or not.
‘We were in the same compartment coming down from Victoria. I was amusing myself trying to guess what he was and where he was going.’
‘Did you discover the answers?’ asked Jean. ‘If you did you’ll be able to give us some information. Howard Shannon’s one of our mystery men.’
Tremaine gave her a quizzical look.
‘You sound as though he’s one of several.’
‘So he is,’ she told him. ‘Dalmering’s population is like Gaul in being divided; only it’s divided into two parts and not three. There’s what you might call the indigenous population—the people whose ancestors lived here—and the visiting population, the people who come down periodically, for week-ends and so on. They arrive one day and go back the next, and although we’re used to seeing them about we don’t really know them—not in the sense that we know who their families are and what they do for a living. Shannon comes down at all sorts of irregular intervals. He’s not a stranger, and yet where he goes when he leaves the village and what he does when he gets there we haven’t the faintest idea.’
‘You’re making Dalmering sound an interesting place,’ said Tremaine.
‘Perhaps it is,’ said Russell, and once again there seemed to be an odd note in his voice.
They drove out of the station yard and down the sunlit road leading to the village. It was early summer and the countryside—beautiful at all times in this quiet corner of Sussex—was almost poignantly lovely. Green fields with a fragrance upon them; tree-shaded roads with a copse appearing here and there to prevent any jarring suggestion of pattern or regimentation; ancient cottages intermingled with variedly modern houses, designed to blend into their surroundings as if nature had set them there and not the normally heavy hand of man, and each with its riotous blaze of colour where lupins, delphiniums and peonies bloomed—it was an enchanted land lying between the silver border of the sea and the smooth shoulder of the Downs, which rose up behind it to merge into the blue of a sky hazy with warmth and pregnant with suggestion of droning insects and long, still summer hours.
Murder has a Motive Page 2